Jimi Famurewa reviews Grasso: Mid-market mediocrity with all the glamour of Frankie & Benny’s
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Grasso may have opened with minimal fanfare but there is basically nothing quiet about it. Magicked into the vast, new-built shell of a Dean Street Wagamama, it is an imitation red sauce joint that hits with all the subtlety of a big pizza pie.
Almost 200 covers sprawl across two floors of hectically mismatched retro art. “Disco toilets” throb with flashing lights and pummelling floor-fillers. There is the domed bulk of an oven tended by thick-armed pizzaioli, a long, bustling bar and, generally, the boisterous, high-volume atmosphere of a steroidal modern trattoria. And then, below the groovy Seventies font of the logo, there is the key phrase “Italian-American Restaurant” — a vital indicator that (like the Dover, Alley Cats Pizza, Carlotta and more) here is a venture tapping into a dining trend that is suddenly hotter than an arrabbiata made for an enemy.
Which is all to say that Grasso — launched just before Christmas by the Sicilian-heritage McCaffrey family — seemingly has the whole package of personable warmth, palpable hype and zeitgeist-grabbing, nostalgic appeal.
So it is with the practiced hesitance of the professional buzzkill that I deliver this news: the experience of actually eating at Grasso is, for the most part, just not all that enjoyable. Pizzas and pasta sauces underwhelm; salads and sides are abundant but inexpertly rendered. And for all that this place currently finds itself engulfed by attention, excitement and mainstream goodwill, I left with the sense I had experienced something with all the transporting glamour of a tarted-up Frankie & Benny’s.
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Madeleine and I took the kids along for a Saturday lunch, mostly motivated by a menu featuring an abundance of things that they will actually eat (can children overdose on pizza? Probably best not to tell me if so). We did not have a booking and so we were led all the way through a labyrinth of thronged crowds into a frigid little exposed brick annexe beside the accessible toilets. “Siberia” doesn’t quite capture its thwarted coldness; my abiding early image is of the 10-year-old solemnly setting down his Pokémon cards to put his coat back on. Still, the wait staff, all garbed in red corduroy overshirts, had a charm that seeped through into the first dishes. Rosemary garlic bread yielded warm, crackled triangles of subtly fragrant dough, prompting ravenous grabbing and big, appreciative grins. Mozzarella sticks, trickled with honey and set in a smear of ‘nduja, had a balance of sweetness, heat and cheese-pulling elasticity that was downright undeniable.
Can children overdose on pizza? Probably best not to tell me if so
It was the mains and their accompaniments that mostly soured the mood. The feted “mom’s spaghetti” (with its pork and beef meatballs based on a third-generation family recipe) was three passable gobstoppers of lukewarm mince beside a huge, tangled wodge of forgettable tomato pasta. A “cheese pie” pizza seemed caught in an awkward stylistic no-man’s land; neither a leopard-spotted Neapolitan number nor a sturdier Brooklyn slice shop effort. And then a kale salad might have been the perplexing nadir — a piled arboretum of scantly-dressed, fibrous, unmassaged leaves, buried beneath a drift of parmesan, and seemingly conceived by someone who had never actually tried to eat more than a mouthful of it. If this is sounding like a car crash then let me clarify that some wholly unexpected bursts of quality — a verdant bowl of spinach and pine nut mafalda pasta that Mads was especially into; the final plot-twist of a genuinely sensational tiramisu — prevented that.
Grasso never quite hits consistent heights or tips into the red of a two-star calamity. What it does is occupy an unchallenging, workmanlike middle that, evidently, has a new currency among both diners and commercial landlords. It is a Big Mamma-style pastiche without the same detailed originality or ribald effervescence. And that is fine. I just can’t help but hope that the quality of the cooking will be sharpened. Or that the next herald of independent mid-market dining’s future won’t feel quite so much like a well-meaning yet wholly unremarkable vestige of the recent past.
81 Dean Street, W1D 3SW. Meal for two plus drinks about £160. Open Tuesday to Thursday from noon-11pm and Friday to Saturday from noon-midnight; grassosoho.com